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Memphis is among the finalists for a federal grant worth up to $30 million that would fund the demolition and redevelopment of Foote Homes, the city’s last large public housing development.

The city got word Tuesday, July 14, from U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen that it is one of nine cities competing for the Choice Neighborhoods grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The city of Memphis is among the finalists for a federal grant worth up to $30 million that would fund the demolition and redevelopment of Foote Homes, the city’s last large public housing development.

A week before the filing deadline for candidates on Memphis’ October ballot, city councilman Jim Strickland filed his qualifying petition for mayor and said he has a campaign war chest of approximately $400,000.

The amounts are roughly the same at about $1 billion, but there’s a difference between City Hall’s liability for pension and non-pension benefits, including health insurance, for city of Memphis employees.

With no debate or discussion, the Memphis City Council approved Tuesday, May 19, Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr.’s proposal to buy the 13-story Donnelley J. Hill state office building at 170 N. Main St., just a stone’s throw from City Hall.

It took about 25 years for an elevator ride to reach the top of The Pyramid.

That’s how long several generations of political leaders – three county mayors and three Memphis mayors as well as a changing group of city council members over seven elections – have been seeking a Pyramid with a ride to the apex.

With a HUD official in town last week bearing word of a $3 million job training grant for public housing residents, city leaders remained focused on what Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. calls “the big one.”

Incoming city chief administrative officer Jack Sammons should arrive at City Hall on May 8, just a few days after Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. presents his budget propsosal to the Memphis City Council.

For most of its 103-year life as city property, the Mid-South Fairgrounds has been a place where Memphians remember why they came there in the past, as local leaders have periodically pushed to remake its landscape and in turn create more memories going forward.

Facing specific criticism from political challengers that his administration is disorganized and hasn’t focused on priorities much past initial press conferences, Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. acted this week to shake up his office starting at the top.

The idea that a declining shopping mall can be redeveloped and reinvigorated as a “town center” with local government offices as a catalyst for private developers appears to be on its way to a meeting with reality.

The city of Memphis secured $6.7 million in federal funding last week to improve and rehab public housing.

Meanwhile, the city’s application for a much larger federal grant to demolish the city’s last large public housing development was making the rounds at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Shelby County commission chairman Justin Ford is running for Memphis Mayor in 2015.

Ford announced his intention to challenge Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. Monday, Feb. 9, joining former county commissioner James Harvey, city council member Jim Strickland, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden in the growing field.

Nashville is a more turbulent place than usual these days, especially Capitol Hill. So Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. and his administration probably won’t tempt the turbulence there by taking their plan for a Tourism Development Zone to finance a Mid-South Fairgrounds renovation to the Tennessee Building Commission later this month.

Close isn’t enough when it comes to winning elections. But it works when it comes to financing the campaigns leading to the elections.

And Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. and his most vocal challenger so far, City Council member Jim Strickland, posted campaign dollar amounts this week that suggest a lively campaign later in this election year.

Nobody running for election on the Oct. 8 ballot can even pull a qualifying petition to get on the ballot until April, yet February is shaping up as the month when it is determined what kind of challenge and how many challengers incumbent Mayor A C Wharton Jr. will face.

Memphis City Council members are likely to have some questions Tuesday, Jan. 20, about the still tentative settlement of the last part of the court fight for control of Beale Street.

The tentative terms of the settlement between the city of Memphis and the Beale Street Development Corp. leaked last week and include a share of revenues from the operation of the entertainment district for the BSDC that would otherwise go to the city, which owns the property between Second and Fourth streets.

Even in the best of times, the relationship between any Memphis mayor and any group of 13 on the Memphis City Council is adversarial. That has been the intent of the structure of city government since the mayor-council form of government took effect in 1968.

Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. will ask the Memphis City Council to approve the approximately $30 million in city funding at the core of the settlement of the six-year-old schools funding controversy and lawsuit.

At the end of the Shelby County Democratic Party’s annual Kennedy Day fundraiser in January, former Memphis City Council member and state Rep. Carol Chumney, who was not among the speakers, challenged the party establishment from her table to do more to support women running for office.

When he ran for Memphis mayor in the 2009 special election, A C Wharton Jr. said he was running to win, but also to change the nature of the city’s politics.

“This is what hurts us in politics today,” Wharton said five years later during the first fundraiser Monday, Nov. 17, in his campaign for re-election to a second full four-year term as mayor. “Everybody wants to stand up and say how is this going to go over. And if it doesn’t look like it’s going to go over well, they back down.”

2009: Former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton said he had received a “target” letter from federal prosecutors indicating he was the target of a federal investigation into an option he had on the land where the Greyhound bus terminal then stood. Ultimately the investigation went nowhere.

City of Memphis employees just emerged from the open enrollment period for the still-evolving changes in health insurance benefits for 2015. And city retirees are about to enter their open enrollment period for the same benefits plans that take effect in January.

Chancellor Walter Evans won’t rule until later this month on a move by city retirees to at least temporarily halt the city’s plan to end a 70 percent subsidy of health insurance premiums for city retirees.

Vasco Smith remembers working the polls at Fairview Junior High School in the 1960s as a child. His job was simple – to hand out campaign literature and not stray within the 100-foot limit by law between poll workers and the polling place in the gymnasium.

Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson has eliminated the school system’s set of four regional superintendents and replaced them with three associate superintendents in what he said is a change to move the school system’s central office closer to the daily operation of schools.

Candidates and political strategists who advise those candidates have a complex relationship with endorsements.

They have a value in building momentum for a campaign and in the case of organizations, they usually come with a check or in-kind contribution. But in and of themselves -- especially in a long list – their value in terms of influence has its limits.

There is a unique and persistent part of the political process that gnaws at candidates, separating them from the voters they court and sometimes stalk. You might call it the day of the ballot.

In the weeks leading up to the start of early voting, they get hit up constantly by those putting out endorsement ballots to be distributed during early voting and on election day, most often by paid poll workers. Candidates must pay to be on a ballot, which those organizing the ballots say is necessary to cover printing and distribution costs.

Beale Street Landing was supposed to cost far less than $43 million and be completed much sooner than the decade it took from the design competition.

But the head of the Riverfront Development Corp. overseeing the 6-acre landing and its construction says with the formal two-day opening of the landing starting Friday, June 27, the riverfront project at the foot of Beale Street and on the northern edge of Tom Lee Park should begin to counter critics of how the project has been managed.

Ricky Wilkins is promising to match U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen’s energy level and be more of a presence in the district than Cohen if he upsets the incumbent in the August Democratic primary for the 9th Congressional District.

The Memphis City Council on Tuesday, May 6, got its first detailed look at the Memphis Police Department’s budget proposal, which was followed by the council starting the process of bringing back to life the Police Civilian Review Board. That would begin with a series of community meetings and recommendations from a citizens group in August.

In seven words last week, Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. got the attention of hundreds of planners who gathered in the city for the “Memphis Boot Camp,” a summit of sorts toward the idea of changing the city’s philosophy and approach to community development and economic development.

The ongoing fallout from the backlog of untested rape kits is beginning to develop some boundaries and dividing lines as it moves into federal court and expands outside court to include a backlog of 300 rape kits by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.

When the National Civil Rights Museum formally reopens Saturday, April 5, it will be with the “breaking” of a ceremonial chain at the new entrance to the building that was once the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

The plan to demolish the last large public housing development in Memphis and use the demolition as a catalyst for a larger redevelopment of the surrounding area did not make the final cut with federal housing officials in Washington.

A Knoxville-based hospitality company has closed on the purchase of the vacant Greyhound facility Downtown and will transform the property into a Hilton Garden Inn.

Turkey Creek Hospitality completed the $1.7 million purchase of the 1.3-acre property Tuesday, March 18, and will bring a 140-room Hilton Garden Inn to the heart of Downtown Memphis. Hank Martin and Elliot Embry with NAI Saig Co. represented Greyhound Lines Inc. in the transaction.

The Tuesday, March 4, discussion Memphis City Council members had with Tennessee Comptroller Justin Wilson, Tennessee Treasurer David Lillard and consultants from four actuarial firms centered on the city’s pension liability.

The city of Memphis would move government offices into two shopping malls and the Soulsville Town Center under tentative “conceptual” plans Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. took Tuesday, Feb. 18, to the Memphis City Council.

What began as a plan last year for $1.5 million in city funding to fix the roof and make other repairs at Whitehaven’s Southbrook Mall has now become a larger and probably more expensive plan for development in a broad area of Whitehaven.

As a brass band leading a lunch-hour parade on Beale Street last Friday passed Handy Park, a crew wearing the district’s new uniforms for maintenance workers were taking down the Performa Entertainment sign outlining the ground rules for the park area.

December was already going to be a busy month at City Hall for the administration of Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr.

He would be bringing a plan to provide $15 million in city financing for the $180 million Crosstown revitalization project and rolling out its fix to address the Tennessee Comptroller’s vocal concerns about the city’s unfunded pension liability.

The president of the Mid-South Fair says the nonprofit organization wants to return to Memphis.

“We were told to leave our home,” Michael Doyle, president of the fair, told Memphis City Council members of the fair’s departure as Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton made fifth-term plans for a renovation of the Mid-South Fairgrounds that originally included a new Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.

The president of the Mid-South Fair told Memphis City Council members Tuesday, Nov. 19, that the nonprofit organization wants to return to Memphis.

“We were told to leave our home,” Michael Doyle, president of the fair, told council members of the fair’s departure as Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton made plans for a renovation of the Mid-South Fairgrounds that originally included a new Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium.

The T-shirt is plain and black with a simple logo that reads “Eat Local,” and if you see someone wearing it, the chances are pretty good they work at a locally owned restaurant.

In recent years there has been a “Buy Local” campaign among some business leaders that’s been hard to miss. Less conspicuous but still easy to find is evidence of perhaps a more influential trend – how the city is moving toward what might be called a “Lead Local” preference based on some recent changes in leadership of some of the city’s most important institutions.

Robert Lipscomb, director of the city of Memphis’ Division of Housing & Community Development, says the retail to be part of the city’s Fairgrounds overhaul will not be in competition with businesses in the nearby Cooper-Young Historic District or Overton Square.

A 3-square-mile Tourism Development Zone would finance a $233 million renovation of the Mid-South Fairgrounds sought by the administration of Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr.

The city sent its 88-page application Sept. 13 to Tennessee Finance Commissioner Larry B. Martin. The application seeks state permission to use incremental sales tax revenue estimated at close to $12 million a year starting in 2016 to pay off the bonds to finance a project whose price tag is just below the $250 million FedExForum.

At the start of the fourth week of the school year for the unified countywide school system, interim superintendent Dorsey Hopson and Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong talked directly about school security for the first time.

It took three weeks into the unified school system’s first school year for Memphis Police to get a memo that they were to respond to calls at Shelby County Schools within the city of Memphis.

The information bulletin from Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong went out to all officers Thursday, Aug. 22, the same day that a 5-year-old kindergarten student at Westside Elementary School walked into the Frayser school with a gun in his backpack and the gun went off in the backpack.

2012: Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell vetoed a referendum on a half-cent countywide sales tax hike and the Shelby County Commission overrode the veto putting the item to voters in the city of Memphis and the unincorporated county on the Nov. 6 ballot. Voters defeated the sales tax hike.

The charter school that opened for class Thursday, Aug. 15, in North Memphis is unique for several reasons.

A total of 130 children, all of them in the custody of Memphis-Shelby County Juvenile Court, are assigned to Thurgood Marshall High School of Career Development. Of that number, 86 had registered on the first day of classes at the school within a school at Northside High School.

Eight years after it was closed to the public by the city of Memphis, the Magevney House will reopen Sept. 7.

The limited opening of the historic home at 198 Adams Ave., part of the city’s museum system, will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the first Saturday of each month. Tours of the house and garden will take about 40 minutes.

Eight years after it was closed to the public by the city of Memphis, the Magevney House will reopen Sept. 7.

The limited opening of the historic home at 198 Adams Ave., part of the city’s museum system, will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the first Saturday of each month. Tours of the house and garden will take about 40 minutes.

Germantown High School principal Ted Horrell warned a busload of school board members, staff and interim superintendent Dorsey Hopson that they were about to see some confusion on his campus.

On the opening day of the first school year for the unified school system Monday, Aug. 5, Horrell stopped the group just outside the school’s cafeteria, which was in its third of four lunch periods of the school day.

Less than a week from the start of the first year of the consolidated school district, countywide school board members Tuesday, July 30, approved a series of policy decisions that reconcile differences between the old Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools systems.

Less than a week from the start of the first year of the consolidated school district, countywide school board members Tuesday, July 30, approved a series of policy decisions that reconcile differences between the old Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools systems.